3quarksdaily

Of Sleuths and Starships

One of the great achievements in the art of today will draw to its conclusion this Friday on the Sci-Fi  Channel. If you're not familiar with Battlestar Galactica, but you admire superb filmmaking, literature, or the languages of symbol and myth; if the sci-fi genre gives you the geeky creepies, but you consider issues of government, history and technology to be critically important for our collective future – if you want to provide a superior education for your children of teenage years or above – I recommend marathoning the DVDs. The four-season show caps an extraordinary decade of accomplishment in a medium that we, for the moment at least, refer to as as "television"; however increasingly antiquated that word might sound.

A completely new type of televisual art has bloomed right under our noses, so quickly it's only just acquired a genre. (I hope the name's provisional. "Mega-movie" is pretty bad.) I prefer the term "video literature," or "VidLit," as the the college shorthand would have it: densely woven, symbolically rich, long-arc dramas with a large ensemble cast of  rounded, three-dimensional characters who mature and evolve. In this category we'd place, among others, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Firefly, The Wire, Deadwood and Veronica Mars.

Veronica Mars, for its first two seasons (2004-06), really upped the ante in terms of what could be accomplished through video narrative. The show, which tv writers pegged as a "high-school detective drama," wasn't just diagnosing America's socioeconomic illnesses; it began predicting them with freakish accuracy. In the Season Two premiere, Veronica and her high-school journalism class go on a field trip to meet with a local baseball star. The rich popular kids hop a limo back to class; the working-class kids take the schoolbus. The schoolbus drives off a cliff and plummets into the Pacific. It's the lever on which the entire season is lifted. And it was broadcast on September 28, 2005, less than a month after New Orleans drowned, exposing the fatal inequities in American society.

Two episodes later, Veronica finds herself in a Future Business Leaders of America club, betting on investments. A local real-estate investment trust, Casablancas Enterprises, appears to be doing spectacularly well – until Veronica discovers the properties are all scams. Two scenes later, the CEO, H. Richard Casablancas, hears "There's a gentleman from the SEC here to see you" – abandons his office, tells his employees to "shred everything," and jumps aboard a company 'copter bound for Mexico.

That's the mortgage crisis in a nutshell, folks: narrated by the character of a 17-year-old girl, on a show about a "high-school detective," almost exactly three years before the collapse of Lehman Brothers. 

In Veronica Mars, the action-movie celebrity is a sex addict; the Major League slugger, a gambler in hock to the mob. The mayor tries to incorporate class division; and the gang-banger from the barrio delivers street justice when the politically-knotted sheriff's department sits on its hands. The fictional town of  Neptune, CA becomes a psychopolitical portrait of America, and the Private Investigator, Veronica Mars, is protagonist, author and instrument: an X-ray revealing the interpersonal archaeology, the socioeconomic strata, and the webs of personal politics that comprise 21st-century American life. For a societal cross-section of equal bandwidth, I think you'd have to turn to Dickens. You can watch the entire first season online.

It's been thrilling to witness so many artistic renderings of our postmodern condition: Buffy's use of horror and the occult to illuminate our adolescence; Firefly's portrayal of the rogue versus the establishment; The Wire's surveillance of our social ills; Deadwood's ballad of interdependence and moral compromise in the making of the American West. And then there is Battlestar Galactica.

For the uninitiated, BSG was originally an ersatz sci-fi 1978 movie and 1979 tv series about the extermination of the human species by a race of robots called Cylons. The survivors of the holocaust leave aboard a ragtag fleet of space-freighters and pleasure cruisers led by the sole surviving military vessel, the Battlestar Galactica. Their goal: an uncharted planet, known only to myth – a new home, a planet called Earth. It was reimagined in 2003 by Ronald D. Moore, who cut his sci-fi teeth writing for Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and Star Trek: Voyager. And what he did looks something like this:

Here's a witty, zippy recap of Seasons 1-3. It's designed not to "spoil" the show but to whet your appetite for a detailed viewing. It's also pretty darn entertaining:

It has been said, with a degree of accuracy, that Battlestar Galactica's plotlines have tracked, and have provided a running commentary on, American government during 9/11 and the Iraq War: a subtle and sophisticated counterpoint to the ideological certitude of 24. There's a Memorial Wall for victims of the Cylons' terrorism; Cylon "sleeper cells"; a president of dubious legitimacy directed by religious prophecy; questions about responsibility and "blowback"; and a brutal, complicated conversation on the ethics of torture, both physical and psychological. There are also important conversations about the constitution of democratic government, the balance of power between civil and military leadership, the role of a free press, radicalism and political imprisonment, and the role of labor unions. To which we can say, "Not half bad, Mr. Moore." But BSG's ambitions are far greater than portraiture; it attempts, and I would say succeeds, in creating a vital, dynamic myth for contemporary Western civilization.

BSG's primary underlying theme, as of most science fiction, is the relationship between our technology and our humanity. In its narrative, we can see a thematic genetic code stretching back through a number of landmarks in science-fiction: the consequences of the scientifically monstrous creation in Frankenstein; the replicants of Blade Runner; the robot wars of The Terminator. And from William Gibson's Neuromancer and The Matrix we're introduced to the fusion of cybernetic and organic mind, the mind able to interpret multiple sets of streaming code.

What BSG brings to this lineage is a spectacularly creative rendering of religious history. The Cylons are monotheists – radically defamiliarizing our own civilizational heritage of monotheism. Perhaps Moore was inspired by the ominous Cyclopean eye of a Cylon, moving back and forth in its black slit. Interestingly, in checking this idea I encountered the original Cylon – an Athenian who, directed by the Oracle at Delphi, attempted a coup in 632 BC, the first reliably dated event in ancient Greek history. This fact may well have inspired Moore to make the humans in this story polytheists, with an Olympian pantheon; they comprise the 12 colonies of Kobol, each named for a Zodiac sign. (A mythical 13th colony is said, in the ancient writings of Kobol, to have discovered the route to Earth.) It may have also inspired Moore's single greatest creative innovation, the Hybrid: a failed Cylon clone who, plugged into the heart of each Cylon base ship, effectively becomes the ship – sensing the entire universe in its data stream, which it voices in a mad Oracular stream-of-consciousness like Ulysses with a tech degree.

A recent article in The Ampersand considered BSG's relationship to The Aeneid; I think that limits the scope of our imagination. Galactica is commanded by an Admiral Adam-a. Two important characters are named Saul (the first King of Israel and also, Saul of Tarsus, later St. Paul) and Helen (the face that launched a thousand ships). BSG, I think, has remixed the chaotic uncertainty and strange syncretism of religious belief that characterized the late Roman Empire, during the first few centuries of Christianity.

In the midst of our anxieties over the future of our Republic, now a cultural Empire in all but name, we have been granted with a work of the highest art: a saga that recontextualizes our deep cultural history by defamiliarizing it, vaulting it into the distant future, reminding us of the chaotically cyclical nature of history, and then returning us to our immediate present. In the penultimate episode, broadcast last Friday, we are returned, Lost-style, to the lives of the characters on Caprica before the nuclear apocalypse.

They look very much like our own. 

"All this has happened before, and all this will happen again," say the Prophecies of the Lords of Kobol. Without giving much away, in this season's astonishing episode "No Exit," a Cylon sleeper on board Galactica is shot in the head; the bullet hyperactivates his neural net, and he begins narrating, breathlessly, the entire history of the Cylon-human conflict, thousands of years old, forgotten beneath the hardened facts of the survivalist present tension – like a prophetic poet. Like an Oracle becoming Herodotus:

Among bright stars I'm lost. And all the forgotten faces all the forgotten showed and we seek the Great Forgotten we seek the Forgotten Language…  He whose guile, stirred with revenge… and all the forgotten faces…

Something wonderful is happening. Get the others. I remember everything. I see everything.

Later in the episode, another Cylon model tells of witnessing a supernova:

I saw a star explode and send out the building blocks of the Universe. Other stars, other planets, and eventually – life. A supernova: creation itself. I wanted to be there, I wanted to see it. And be part of the moment. And do you know how I perceived one of the most glorious events in the Universe? With these ridiculous gelatinous orbs in my skull. With eyes designed to perceive only a tiny fraction of the EM spectrum. With ears designed only to hear vibrations in the air…

"I don't want to be human," spits Dean Stockwell's character with agonized contempt:

I want to see gamma-rays. I want to hear X-rays! I want to– I want to...smell dark matter. Do you see the absurdity of what I am? I can't even express these things properly because I have to– I have to conceptualize complex ideas in this stupid, limiting spoken language!  But I know I want to reach out with something other than these prehensile paws, and feel the solar wind of a supernova flowing over me. I am a machine: and I could know much more. I could experience so much more but I'm trapped in this absurd body. And why? Because my…creators thought that God wanted it that way.

It's as if Hamlet's monologue had continued after "quintessence of dust." As if Milton's Satan had circuitry. And it's as if both Hamlet and Paradise Lost are being quoted, by a character I'll refrain from naming, in the words spoken next:

We didn't limit you. We gave you something wonderful: free will. The ability to think creatively, to reach out to others with compassion, to love…

From there, it's a debate about history and responsibility – who is ultimately responsible for the Fall? I can't go into detail here, but suddenly it appears that Homer, Moses, Shakespeare, Milton and Blake have all been collected for that Dinner Party in Heaven we've all fantasized about attending, and they're debating the Israeli-Palestinian conflict using the chicken and the egg:

"Go back far enough, it's always them," one says.
"Go back far enough, a germ gets blamed for splitting in two," says another.

Back in the operating room, the bullet-brained Cylon is struggling through aphasia. Because this is about history. Words. The Word. He manages to explain, "…Cavil rejected mercy, he had a twisted sense of morality, he blocked access to our books – no – – ahh – our memories –" and brings up a name. Daniel. "Judged by God," the name means, a famous interpreter of dreams, a prophet, able to read the writing on the wall.

In last week's episode, "Daybreak Pt. 1," this character falls into a coma, and assumes the role of a Hybrid. He remembers his life as a "human." Again, hopefully without giving too much away, he speaks some extraordinary words:

Look, you want to know the truth? …What matters to me is a perfect throw, a perfect catch, the perfect step-and-block. It's perfection. That's what it's about. It's about those moments when you, when you can feel the perfection of creation – the, the beauty of physics, the wonder of mathematics, you know, the elation of action and reaction, and that is the kind of perfection I want to be connected to.

Ladies and gentlemen, we've heard from the "quintessence of dust"; we've heard the voice of Milton's God; now we're hearing Hamlet talk about the genius of this "paragon of animals" after hearing about Newton's God, a geometer.

•••

To be as gods. We Fall. We become human. We evolve. We invent. We strive for a more perfect union. Once upon a time, the world was young and life was nasty, brutish and short. In the struggle for survival, heroes were made, and people who understood humanity were endowed with far sight and wrote histories and myths.

We believe, we investigate the world, we invent technologies to serve our ends, only to have them buckle civilization itself: the printing press, slavery, variable-rate mortgages – yes, all are technological systems we've invented. But once upon a time, science and religion and mythical syncretism were apprehended in artistic vision, and it pulled us out of our medievalism – into the Renaissance. There's a reason why academic symposia have been held on Battlestar Galactica and why, tomorrow evening, there will be a panel discussion on Battlestar Galactica at the United Nations.

Just maybe, we can make it. 

Gaza, Giza and the other CNN effect

Krzysztof Kotarski

My grandmother loves me very much. The feeling, of course, is mutual.

So, with that qualifier out of the way, please forgive the following anecdote. I am a good boy at heart, and my grandma’s English is poor enough that she will never read this.

In early June 2007, I flew to The Middle East (“The” has to be capitalized, for reasons that will become clear). I landed at Ben Gurion International Airport and made my way to Ra’anana, one of the satellite communities around Tel Aviv, where I presented an academic paper on a Polish journalist who interviewed the famous (and infamous) Avraham Stern shortly before his death.

My grandmother, who raised me in my youth and with whom I enjoy an Obama-ish relationship, was quite proud that I was presenting my research at an academic conference in a foreign country (“My grandson! Look at him!”). However, she was worried. A conference was great, she said, but why did it have to take place in what she still refers to as the Holy Land, which, in her mind, is a country of bombs, raids, irate settlers and marauding bulldozers, each liable to maim or kill her eldest grandson.

“Why don’t you present the paper in Canada?” she asked when I first told her about my trip. “Or come visit, and do it here?”

Although I had no answer for her at the time other than my customary “don’t worry,” I began to consider my grandmother’s anxieties.

She has never been to Israel, Palestine, Jordan or Egypt (my itinerary), and the last time she set foot in “The Middle East” was in the 1980s when she travelled to Libya to visit my grandfather who was among the Polish engineers helping the then-evil Gaddafi regime build highways in exchange for oil.

Since her very successful visit(she found Libyans to be kind and engaging, and she recalls the archeological ruins near Tripoli with a smile in her eyes) her only exposure to “The Middle East” came from the same source as for the rest of us, from the international press. And, with the Cold War in the rearview mirror, international reporting in Poland and the rest of the old Soviet bloc has come to be dominated by the same international news agencies, the BBC, and, of course, CNN, which has scrutinized the region with increasing frequency (and increasing anxiety) since its rise to prominence during the first Gulf War.

While the term "CNN effect" has been used by television pundits (sometimes on CNN) and by international scholars to denote the influence of the 24-hour news cycle on foreign policy formation, there is another, non-elite, CNN effect at play. While scholars (such as George Washington University’s Steven Livingston) tend to focus on the effect images of wars, natural catastrophes, terrorist attacks or man-made humanitarian disasters have on policy-makers, fewer studies look downstream, to the types of opinions and prejudices formed among the general population that outlast each particular crisis. What happens after the headlines change to the next earthquake, explosion or massacre? What is the residual CNN effect, and how long do the headlines echo, beyond the initial flashpoint that draws in and consumes the nomadic international press?

Because my grandmother devours the news (some of my first memories involve being told to be quiet as we listened to jammed Radio Free Europe broadcasts in her Warsaw apartment), her views on “The Middle East” are just as firm as her thoughts on her most beloved topic—Polish electoral politics. She wascertainthat Israel was a dangerous place to visit for her favourite Polish-Canadian academic/journalist, just as she iscertainthat the Kaczynski twins represent Poland’s best chance for maintaining sovereignty within the EU. (Needless to say, grandma and I do not always see eye-to-eye on the issues.)

Because she does not travel much anymore and because Middle Eastern geopolitics have never consumed her (she does, after all, have a compelling geopolitical chess match taking place in her own backyard), I am not certain that she can distinguish between the first intifada and the second, or between Ismail Haniyeh and Mohammed Dahlan. Yet, as far as the CNN effect is concerned, this does not matter. The emotional triggers that help to shape her views are fully formed, and she is not likely to be dissuaded.

Of particular pertinence is her view of Gaza, which, in her vocabulary, has become something of a four-letter word. Although she sympathizes with the Palestinian cause (and sympathizes very strongly, as one of an ever-diminishing number of Europeans who know firsthand what a military occupation looks like), the word “Gaza” evokes particular dread. When I first mentioned the conference in Ra’anana, she said that “at least it wasn’t Gaza.” This theme would continue throughout my visit.

Now, considering the timing of my trip, grandma was not entirely wrong to be worried. This was early June 2007, Hamas and Fatah were about to engage in a battle for Gaza, and the entire region was tense. The BBC’s Alan Johnson was in captivity for almost three months at that point and the almost-daily reports on his fate dominated the international coverage. When I told grandma that I was planning to do some minor freelance reporting once my academic duties were fulfilled, she became uneasy. When I told her that I was going to the Palestinian territories, I could hear her heart stop, and hesitate a little.

I wanted to visit Bethlehem and maybe Ramallah (both West Bank towns), partly because I wanted to write that it is a shame to form one’s opinion of the Palestinian people from CNN alone, and partly because some of my Israeli hosts kept insisting that I not go for reasons of ideology.

Now, my grandmother’s only ideology is that her eldest grandson stay safe, so when I phoned to say that I was off to Palestine, I took an earful. I tried to explain away Bethlehem saying that I wanted to visit for biblical reasons, but grandma wasn’t sold on such a flimsy explanation.

“You don’t even go to church,” she said wearily. “Please stay safe, and please stay away from Gaza.”

Of course, my visit to the West Bank was quite pleasant, and, although it should go without saying (but sadly it does not), the Palestinian people were quite unlike the angry masses one occasionally sees on the evening news. I could happily report to my Ra’anana hosts that the Israeli portrait of the average Palestinian seems just as off base as the Palestinian portrait of the average Israeli, and that despite the obvious tensions, people remain people, even when politics can make daily life incredibly difficult.

After making my way back through the structure that some Israelis insist on calling a fence (it sometimes is a fence, but where I crossed it looked like a ten-meter concrete wall with a Berlin-esque watchtower), I called from the safety of Jerusalem saying that with my conference finished, I was off to Egypt.

“You’re not going to go to Gaza, are you?” my grandma asked in a nervous tone.

“No, grandma. Just the Sinai and Cairo.”

Just as I crossed the border into Egypt, the nervous situation momentarily erupted into something much more violent. As I struggled against the heat on an Egyptian bus completely unaware of the world around me, Hamas drove Fatah from the Gaza Strip leading to the current equilibrium (or stalemate) in Palestinian politics.

Before I knew that anything had happened, I was in the Sinai backpacker haven of Dahab, many many miles away, watching the images, like my grandmother, courtesy of CNN International and the BBC.

I sent grandma a brief note telling her that I was safe, and a week later, after I made it to Cairo and after I took the metro to see the pyramids (that still sounds a bit surreal), I called grandma to let her know that I was ok.

“Grandma, I went to Giza today!”

“GAZA?!?!?”

“No, no! Giza! G-i-z-a!”

“GAZA?!?!?”

“No, the pyramids, the Sphinx!”

“GAZA?!?!?”

At this point, my innkeeper, by then fully briefed on my grandmother’s fears, almost doubled over from his chair laughing.

“My friend,” he said, “sometimes, you just don’t think.”

“But I cannot lie to my grandmother,” I protested.

“And besides, it’s just the CNN effect.”

Engrossed in a World of Political Idealism

From The New York Times:

Most television dramas play with the question "what if?" NBC's "West Wing" revels in "if only...."

Sunday's live presidential debate was the quintessence of wishful writing. Two intelligent, principled candidates tossed aside debate rules and went at each other full throttle on live television, debating everything from immigration and energy policy to foreign debt relief.

...

The world hates us, and even Americans deplore the sorry state of political discourse in their country. But only the uninformed or disingenuous complain about the quality of American television. It has a variety and breadth that no other nation can match. For every offensive reality series or inane daytime talk show, there are comedies and dramas that reach far higher in a single episode than most movies or Broadway shows.

More here.

Bad News

From The New York Times:

The current tendency to political polarization in news reporting is a consequence of changes not in underlying political opinions but in costs, specifically the falling costs of new entrants. The rise of the conservative Fox News Channel caused CNN to shift to the left. CNN was going to lose many of its conservative viewers to Fox anyway, so it made sense to increase its appeal to its remaining viewers by catering more assiduously to their political preferences.

So why do people consume news and opinion? In part it is to learn of facts that bear directly and immediately on their lives - hence the greater attention paid to local than to national and international news. They also want to be entertained, and they find scandals, violence, crime, the foibles of celebrities and the antics of the powerful all mightily entertaining. And they want to be confirmed in their beliefs by seeing them echoed and elaborated by more articulate, authoritative and prestigious voices. So they accept, and many relish, a partisan press. Forty-three percent of the respondents in the poll by the Annenberg Public Policy Center thought it ''a good thing if some news organizations have a decidedly political point of view in their coverage of the news.''

More here.

On a New Showtime Series, America's Protector Is a Muslim

From The New York Times:

The lead character is an undercover F.B.I. agent who has managed to infiltrate a Southern California sleeper cell largely because he is a practicing Muslim. The character, Darwyn, is the first major role created on an American series - whether before or after the Sept. 11, 2001, hijackings - that depicts a Muslim as a hero seeking to check the intentions of terrorists.

That the production has such a high gloss of credibility - at least in terms of the prayers that Darwyn utters, the ways he interprets the Koran and his struggles to reconcile his religion with his daily life - is a function of the creative team supporting it: three of those playing prominent roles behind the scenes are themselves Muslims. And having been raised on a steady diet of Arab bad guys - whether on shows like "JAG" or "24," or movies like the Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle "True Lies" - they say they welcomed the opportunity to put a character on television who looked like them, shared their values and sought to save the day.

More here.